After just seven months in Washington, David Kustoff has already achieved the embodiment of a hard-working congressman.

His hair is noticeably grayer on the sides, and he speaks with a calming surety about a host of weighty issues. Among them are the need to reform financial regulations under the flawed, seven-year-old federal law known as Dodd-Frank, the absolute necessity to get rid of the Affordable Care Act and the urgency to enact tax reform and create more jobs, particularly in his Eighth Congressional District.

It is also readily apparent that Kustoff, the former U.S. attorney for West Tennessee who is serving his first term in the House, has earned another distinction. He has become a chaos denier.

And no, I did not invent the term. That honor deservedly goes to Kustoff’s fellow conservative Republican, Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake. In his new book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” Flake lays bare the failure by members of his party to admit and address the chaos and dysfunction in the Donald Trump White House.

Excerpts from Flake’s explosive book were posted Monday on Politico under the headline, “My Party Is in Denial About Trump.” The subhead said, “We created him, and now we’re rationalizing him. When will it stop?

Flake argues that his conservative colleagues “have maintained an unnerving silence as (White House) instability has ensued. To carry on . . . as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties. And tremendous powers of denial.”

He then adds, “I’ve been sympathetic to this impulse to denial, as one doesn’t ever want to believe that the government of the United States has been made dysfunctional at the highest levels, especially by the actions of one’s own party.”

Flake, who is up for re-election next year, says many of these same deniers are the very ones who, after Barack Obama’s election in 2008, said their top priority was making him a one-term president. They then stood “largely silent when the most egregious and sustained attacks on Obama’s legitimacy were leveled by marginal figures (I include Trump among them) who would later be embraced and legitimized by far too many of us.”

Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, are you reading this?

Kustoff, who addressed the Memphis Rotary Club Tuesday, remains an ardent Trump supporter. “I genuinely believe that this country is better off today with Donald Trump’s election,” Kustoff said in response to a question – although he never mentioned Trump’s name during his prepared remarks.

When I asked him if he’s among those referred to in Flake’s book as chaos deniers, Kustoff artfully skirted the question – another trait that politicians quickly learn after going to Washington.

Instead, he insisted his constituents in West Tennessee's Eighth Congressional District are concerned about jobs, healthcare and tax reform – not what’s playing out in the national news.

“I don’t hear one person talking about Russia,” he said before adding, “there is a media bias against Donald Trump and they are out to cook the goose.”

After threats of nuclear action from North Korea, President Trump's, er, calm reaction was to issue a bigger, fiery, more powerful threat. He's always got to be firing something, usat.ly/2wIcXDk USA TODAY

The same assertion is echoed by Seventh District Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R.-Tennessee, who, about an hour before Kustoff took the stage for his Rotary address, told CNN that people in her district are not the least concerned about Russia.

Except most Americans are indeed concerned about the chaotic nature of the Trump presidency. A Politico/Morning Consult Poll conducted late last month showed 60 percent of respondents believe the administration is very or somewhat chaotic. That includes 34 percent of Republicans.

The poll was conducted before Mr. Potty Mouth, Anthony Scaramucci, was ushered out of the White House and just as Reince Priebus was being let go as chief of staff.

So yes, representatives Kustoff and Blackburn are part of the chaos deniers club. They, along with the rest of us, are witnessing the train wreck that is the Trump administration. Except their view is through rose-colored glasses, and they’re telling themselves, “there is nothing to see here.”

As Sen. Flake, in his book excerpts, points out about his fellow Republicans, “Too often, we observe the unfolding drama along with the rest of the country, passively, all but saying, ‘someone should do something!’ without seeming to realize that that someone is us.

“And so, that unnerving silence in the face of an erratic executive branch is an abdication, and those in positions of leadership bear particular responsibility.”

Exactly.

Otis Sanford holds the Hardin Chair of Excellence in Journalism and Strategic Media at the University of Memphis. Contact him at 901-678-3669 or at o.sanford@memphis.edu. Follow him on Twitter @otissanford.